u/DrP4R71CL3

Every single time someone posts a new indie game here, I see the same thing happen in the comments.

Within like 5 minutes someone goes "vibecoded?" and then it just spirals. Suddenly everyone's a detective. "That UI looks AI." "The art style is giving Midjourney." "LLM slop." Game's dead before anyone even looked at the gameplay.

And I just have to ask, have any of you actually played it?

Here's the thing though, this isn't new. People said the same stuff about every tool that ever changed how games were made.

When game engines like Unity and Unreal became accessible, the old guard said real devs write their own engines. When asset stores appeared, people called it lazy and fake. When RPG Maker blew up, everyone dunked on it. When drag and drop tools came out, "that's not real programming." Every single time, the community lost its mind, and every single time, genuinely good games still came out of those tools anyway.

AI is just the current version of that panic.

And honestly at this point, no one is hand coding every single thing anymore. Nobody writes their own physics engine from scratch. Nobody hand draws every texture. Developers use whatever gets the job done. That has always been true and pretending otherwise is just nostalgia.

I'm not saying AI has zero problems. Studios using it to fire artists, the training data stuff, that's all real and worth being angry about. But that's a completely different conversation from jumping someone's indie game post because a texture looked a bit too clean.

If the game is fun, does it actually matter? Like genuinely. Are you reviewing the tools or the game?

and yes i fixed my long text using AI (just for the haters who wants to hate for the sake of hating)

Playable Link: https://tycora.io

Platform: Browser (mobile + desktop)

Description:

Tycora is a business tycoon game about starting with nothing and ending up owning everything. You begin with one struggling little business tap, reinvest, buy your second building, then your fifth, then a whole sector. The numbers start tiny and end absurd, the classic idle growth curve, but tuned to respect your time instead of wasting it.
What sets it apart is that there’s no safe autopilot.

Random high-stakes crises hit you mid-run: a lawsuit, a market crash, a shady offer on the table. Take the dirty money and survive, or stay clean and bleed for it bad calls genuinely cost you. The whole economy is server-authoritative, so the realtime leaderboard is real players, not bots or inflated ghosts. Prestige resets let you come back stronger and climb the ranks, with your title and profile evolving as your empire grows: Hot Dog Heir to Sector Lord to Magnate.

It runs in the browser on phone and desktop, free, with no signup wall just to try it. I’m still tuning balance and game feel, so honest feedback is exactly what I’m after does it hook you in the first five minutes, or fizzle?

Free to Play Status:

•	Free to play

Involvement:

Solo creator. I designed the game the economy, the prestige loop, the crisis/tradeoff system and directed the full build end to end, making all the architecture and game-design decisions. Day job is in cybersecurity, not game dev, so Tycora was me proving out how far a disciplined solo build could go. Everything you see, from the server-authoritative backend to the UI, is my project.

Made this one myself. It's a tycoon/empire-builder that runs straight in the browser, no signup, no download, no plugins, it just makes a guest account when you load it so you can play instantly.

You start with a coffee cart and grow it across sectors (real estate, app studios, AI labs, banks, crypto, eventually whole cities). Tap to earn early, then your businesses pay out on their own. There's an events system where stuff goes wrong, regulators, scandals, market crashes, and you pick how to handle it. Plus a stock market to trade, seasons with a leaderboard, and a prestige system if you want to reset and climb again.

Core gameplay

• Start from a single coffee cart and build a sprawling business.
• Active income — tap to earn in the early game
• Idle income — your businesses keep generating cashflow while you're away
• Expand across multiple sectors: food, real estate, tech/app studios, AI labs, banking, crypto, energy, and more
• Scale all the way up to mega-assets ("city within a city")
• Grow into real-world cities — Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, Austin, Shanghai, and others

Upgrades & progression

• Per-business upgrades to boost output and cut costs
• 45 levels of ranks, each with its own title
• Prestige system — reset your run and climb again for a permanent Legacy Tier
• Claimable titles you earn through milestones

Events & decisions

• AI-driven "director" that generates dynamic events so no two runs feel the same
• Crisis events — regulators, scandals, market crashes — that force real choices
• Branching responses: comply, deny everything, double down, and live with the consequences
• Reputation and suspicion mechanics that react to how you play

Markets & trading

• Live stock market (Apex Bourse) with real-time price movement
• Stock price history so you can read trends and time your trades
• Trade alongside building — a second way to grow your fortune

Competition

• Seasons that rotate on a schedule
• Global leaderboard to rank against other players each season

Tech & access

• Runs entirely in the browser — no download
• Installable PWA, plays on mobile and desktop
• No signup required — a guest account is created automatically
• Optional account linking to carry progress across devices (on the roadmap)

Still actively working on it so feedback's very welcome, especially where it gets boring or confusing.

in less of 2 days of release, already 100+ players, i would love to hear about feedbacks and ideas for improvements.

Made this one myself. It's a tycoon/empire-builder that runs straight in the browser, no signup, no download, no plugins, it just makes a guest account when you load it so you can play instantly.

You start with a coffee cart and grow it across sectors (real estate, app studios, AI labs, banks, crypto, eventually whole cities). Tap to earn early, then your businesses pay out on their own. There's an events system where stuff goes wrong, regulators, scandals, market crashes, and you pick how to handle it. Plus a stock market to trade, seasons with a leaderboard, and a prestige system if you want to reset and climb again.

Still actively working on it so feedback's very welcome, especially where it gets boring or confusing.

Been building this in my spare time and it’s finally playable enough to show.

It’s a tycoon game in the browser. No signup, no install, you just open the link and you’re in it makes a guest account behind the scenes. You start with a coffee cart and the whole point is turning that into a stupidly big empire across different sectors. Real estate, app studios, AI labs, banks, crypto, eventually entire cities.

Early on it’s tap to earn, then your businesses start paying out on their own. The part I actually care about is the events though. There’s an AI “director” that keeps throwing stuff at you regulators, scandals, a market crash and you choose how to deal with it (comply, deny everything, double down). Stops every run feeling the same. There’s also a stock market to trade, seasons with a leaderboard, and a ranking/prestige system if you want to reset and climb again.

Stack is React + Vite, Hono/Bun for the backend, PocketBase for data.
A few things I learned the hard way:

•	Keep all the game logic server-side. Early on I had the client doing money math and it took about five minutes of playing my own game before I realized anyone could just edit their balance in the console. Moved everything to the backend so the client basically just asks “can I do this?” and the server decides. Should’ve done that from day one.

•	The admin panel was the best time I spent. I almost skipped it to “just ship the game,” but building a little internal tool to tweak prices, businesses, events etc. without redeploying has saved me probably more hours than it took to build. Now balancing is a slider instead of a deploy.

•	AI writes code fast but it’ll happily paint you into a corner. It’s incredible for momentum but if you don’t stop and actually read what it’s doing, you end up with stuff that’s coupled in weird ways and a refactor you didn’t budget for. I got burned a couple times taking a working feature at face value.

•	The fun is in the tuning, not the features. Adding a new mechanic is the easy dopamine hit. Making the economy actually feel good to play is the real work, and it’s mostly not done yet.

What’s left on the list: proper PvP / hostile takeovers, deeper AI storylines, generated art for everything (some’s still emoji placeholders), a lot of balance passes, better mobile/offline since it’s a PWA, and account linking so you don’t lose your save.

Fair warning, it’s on a testing domain still so stuff will break and I might wipe saves while I’m messing with it. Would really appreciate honest feedback, especially where you got bored or confused.

[ Link in comments ]

Waiting for feedbacks